Colin Farrell is a Huge Fan of Steven Spielberg's E.T. and He Shares His Love For It
My earliest movie memory in a theater is going to see Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. I love that film. It’s one of my all-time favorites and it’s the film that sparked my love of movies.
Well, it turns out that it’s one of Colin Farrell’s favorite movies as well! I’ve got to say, I wasn’t expecting that from him! In a recent interview on Hot Ones, the actor talked about his love for the movie, and the way Henry Thomas's performance helped give a young Farrell the idea that he wanted to pursue acting. Ferrell explained:
"What I thought was remarkable at first when I saw it was E.T., and the excitement of that creature coming from a distant plane, and I would still find that remarkable today. But what I find more remarkable about it now is what a story it is about broken families. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg has made some of the most, as far as I'm concerned, entertaining films in the history of cinema. But even when they're entertaining, at the core, there's some kind of emotional and psychological fracture going on.
“The family in E.T. is in trouble. The feds walking through the forest, and the keys are rattling -- the keys haunted me, every time I heard keys rattling as a child. And magic. When they take off for the first time in that forest and they start flying...I got goosebumps. I got teary-eyed on the couch this Christmas, but that's me [thinking about] my mortality and stuff, I'm sure of it. You know, nostalgia and melancholy. But, you know. So many reasons why it's a great film."
Over the years I’ve met a handful of people that didn’t like E.T. and I don’t get it. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t like this movie! But, those people exist. Anyway, I love that Farrell is a fan of this movie and that it was an inspiration to him. I think this film inspired a lot of people.
I love this movie so much, that it was the first film we talked about on our podcast, Secret Level.